One of the most important tasks performed by database administrators (DBAs) is to provide stable performance in the presence of changes to the database system. Changes to a database system includes, among other things, database system upgrades, parameter modifications, index creations, etc. When these changes are made to the database system, DBAs must ensure that database system performance and end-user satisfaction will not regress (i.e., become worse than before the changes were made). This task is, however, a challenging and time-consuming one because of the difficulty in predicting, in advance, the impact of a change on the performance of a production database system before actually implementing the change on the production database system.
Therefore, there is a need for a process for measuring the impact to the performance of a database system on which changes have been made. This process will enable DBAs to foresee where performance may improve or deteriorate and allow the DBAs to take corrective actions to fix the regressions before implementing the changes to the production database system.